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Vision

To help transition Japan to a peace promoting post-carbon country while enjoying every step of the process.僕のビジョンは、祖国日本で、平和文化を育みポストカーボン（Post-Carbon) 社会を促進してゆく事です。化石燃料や原子力に頼らず、他国の資源を取らない、自給自足な国へのトランジションを実現させてゆきたいです。

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Its so easy and enables you to do so much with fruit, nut, and all kinds of trees.

Imagine you have a volunteer tree in your backyard, and you want it to have fruits. You just might be able to transform it into a fruit producing tree. Even trees along roads in the city might be graft opportunities, like ornamental plum trees. Imagine that, walking back home on a hot summer day and picking a ripe juicy plum off a tree along the sidewalk (don't think about the car exhaust and other pollution, its irrelevant to my point). Fresh local free. Or buying an apple tree and grafting 3 more varieties on, so that you have different flavoured apples that ripen at different months for a longer harvest season. Maybe you don't like the variety you bought and want to replace it with a tastier fruit, you can do that!

You can even graft between certain species!

Yes you can!

Getting ready for a serious grafting session.

The foreground are potted rootstock and on the table are bunches of scion wood.

Since we have so many varieties to graft and we have so many grafters,we need a system to keep track of what we graft and how many.

A few people keep assign and keep track of the grafting,while the grafters perform plant surgery for several hours straight.

Productive and organised permies (not always the case).

The grafters hard at work.

We used a series of potted and bareroot plants as rootstock.

A few practiced on freshly pruned fruit tree wood.

If you are going to do a bunch,

having a good setup is crucial.

Since its easy to mix things up,

the rule is once you are done with any plant material,

throw it on the ground.

Here is the list of scion wood we have.

Varieties of European and Asian plums and pears, cherry, peach, apple, shipova, and seabuckthorn.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Finally a few sunny warm days have poked through the chilly cold grey Spring.Most of the garden beds are dry enough to be forked.It was beautiful to see everyone outside waking the garden up after a long wet winter.

Spring gardening feels like a new beginning for me.A commitment to learn and grow while intimately engage with life.An opportunity to explore the depths of food growing philosophy and practice.Accepting the challenge of choosing methods and responding to unexpected situations.

This year I decided to continue my exploration of shizeno (natural farming) in the far far garden (its really far), and improve my lazy organic gardening for the communal production focused beds.

Biointensive

Most of my experience has been with the Biointensive model I learned at the UC Santa Cruz Farm and Garden/Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS). As the name suggest Biointensive is intense! Its a lot of physical work and I feel like its too rough on the soil. Its an awesome method for Santa Cruz if you want to be a small-scale organic gardener pumping out tons of food and you are physically fit. They are some of the most bump'in gardens with beautiful veggies packed tight in a small amount of space. For more on this, check out How to Grow More Vegetables (Jeavons), or go to amazingly beautiful and educational sites like the UCSC gardens, the Homeless Garden Project, or Camp Joy (all in Santa Cruz).

Biodynamic

Recently, I've been increasingly exposed to more and more biodynamic practices and philosophy. Here at the Bullocks, Doug encouraged us to use, or at least look through, the biodynamic calendar with the moon cycles and other cosmic elements that illuminate what you should plant at what time during each day. My good friends at the Frey Biodynamic Vinyard in Mendocino, CA are the most serious anthroposophists I know and frequently teach me about the various dimensions of Steiner's teachings. What I appreciate about Biodynamic is the integration of various elements (agriculture, medicine and health care, education, architecture, etc) in to a spiritually rooted humanistic belief system. Really intriguing stuff that I hope to learn more about. I don't know enough to put much of it into practice at the moment. Definitely an important circle for the sustainability movement.

Natural Farming

Then there is shizeno, the method and philosophy I am most attracted to.

Whats the difference with organic gardening?

Well, the simple answer I give these days is,

no weeding, no tilling, and no fertilising (including compost).

But, its much more than that.

Those are merely the physical expressions of a way of life.

Shizeno to me is a path of reaching and maintaining ecological balance

Our minds discriminate and we often try to eliminate our problems before understanding why they have have come to be.

I see this as another practice to transcend the dualistic thinking of good and bad.

Its not easy, but its important.

I've been deeply moved by the humility of shizeno farmers,

and their understanding of the soil and local ecology.

They are patient, committed, and hard-working.

More exciting stuff to come about shizeno!

Bullocks 2011

For my assigned garden beds that are to feed the intern community,

I started with my lazy organic method.

We each have a total of about 6-8 garden beds in two different locations.

This year my goal is to use as little or no off island resources,

mainly pelletised chicken manure and crab meal.

I feel that is more inline with my values and I want to challenge myself to localize more.

Why not?

The Lazy Biointensive Method

I define the edges of the bed with a D handle fork, then I turn chunks of the garden bed with a four pronged cultivator. That way its less work and much less chopping of earthworms. I break the big chunks of soil with my hand or a fork and smooth the bed out with a rake and my hands. I really like touching soil so I try to use my hands as much as possible.

Its really important to touch the soil and be intimate with it. Bare hands is so pleasant.

The Bullocks M.O.

Here at the Bullocks we define out paths with stable litter. Then the following year we scoop the decomposed stable litter (free and from nearby) into our beds to add organic matter. This also serves as a weed barrier where we can easily pull any quack grass that migrates toward the beds. We often use freshly mowed grass clippings as a nitrogen rich mulch that also deters the large slug populations which devastate the sweet little sproutlings. It seems common at the Bullocks to add compost, pelletised chicken manure, and crab meal into the beds.

This year I'm in charge of asian greens, fava beans, chinese cabbage, onions, gailan, cucumbers. My companion plants are kale and several fragrant and delicious Japanese plants: shiso, nira, mitsuba, yomogi. The chinese cabbage transplants looked a bit nitrogen deficient and Yuriko suggested pelletised chicken manure but I'm going to see if I can address it with urine (the bucket). I found a bunch of cut grass so I just threw it on my bed as mulch.

*What I learned from several sources is that the key to utilising urine is DILUTION. 1:10 urine to water seems like what most people say. I'm hoping to get a copy of Liquid Gold (Steinfeld) so I can make use of this amazing resources that I am generating all the time!

Coming soon....

In the far far field shizeno beds,

my approach this year is to grow the easiest crops for the climate here.

Mainly brassicas, onion, and maybe some legumes.

I have a long way to go before I get a descent harvest through shizeno,

but I'm committed to get there.

It took Fukuoka and Kawaguchi a few years before they had harvests that

matched their previous chemical farming methods.

In fact I think they both had close to no harvest the first year or two.

I'm in no hurry and luckily I live in an area that i can experiment.

Final thoughts

Yuriko commented that I'm too caught up with philosophy.

I do feel like I'm experiencing the gardening version of the Omnivore's Dilemma sometimes.

There are so many styles to choose from.

And gardening is a very intimate element in my life.

I'm having fun though, and curiosity is driving my desire to explore and learn these different methods.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

This is just a call out to people in Japan about joining the design course this year.

I heard that the course has a few spots left and I think it always sells out with a good size waiting list. Best structured education I ever experienced, dedicated awesome teachers, and a awesome community scene. For details click here.

Welcome!

ようこそ！

You have arrived to a bilingual blog about sustainability, permaculture, and peace activism. Yeah! Please leave a comment if you feel inspired.Thanks for visiting and I hope you spread the seeds:) *the ratio of English to Japanese changes unexpectedly so if there is a lot of strange foreign characters, check out older articles might have the more familiar alphabet.

About Me

A "half", as they call us in Japan, who grew up in metropolis and rural Japan, Hawaii, Santa Cruz CA, Central America, and now Orcas Island WA. Taking a stroll through the path of permaculture, mindfulness, and love. Looking for more like-minded people in Japan or people interested in transforming Japan...
百姓／平和活動家／パーマカルチャー・デザイナーのヒヨコです。ブロックス・パーマカルチャー・ホームステッド（ワシントン州のオーカス島）で弟子入り生活をしていましたが、今は東京で平和と愛を育む活動をしています。先生、仲間、プロジェクト、土地を捜しています！